1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for locking an operative position of each furniture to be accommodated in a furniture accommodating chamber of a furniture raising/lowering type floor equipment. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus for locking an operative position of each chair in an tilted state on the furniture raising/lowering type floor equipment.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, a building such as a hall, a theater, a gymnasium or the like has been increasingly utilized in a multi-purposed fashion. To this end, research and development works have been conducted for providing various kinds of floor equipments. As is well known, this kind of floor equipments are roughly classified into two types, i.e., an expansible/contractive platform displacement type floor equipment and a furniture raising/lowering type floor equipment. In practice, the present invention is concerned with the latter type of floor equipment, i.e., the furniture raising/lowering type floor equipment. With respect to the floor equipments as mentioned above, there has been seen a general tendency that when a plurality of furnitures such as chairs or the like are not in use, they are accommodated in a furniture accommodating chamber of the floor equipment below the floor surface of the building and when they are in use, they are raised upward of the furniture accommodating chamber of the building by raising up a raising/lowering unit with the aid of a driving mechanism so as to allow audiences to enjoy a performance while sitting on their own chairs.
However, as far as the conventional floor equipment as constructed in the above-described manner is concerned, since a structure for firmly holding chairs or the like at the operative position is complicated, and moreover, handling of the conventional floor equipment is time-consuming, there have been raised many requests for providing an apparatus exclusively employable for the purpose of locking an operative position of each furniture independently of a main actuating system for the floor equipment wherein a locking operation is reliably performed with the apparatus. It should be emphasized that few attention has been hitherto paid to an apparatus for locking an operative position of each furniture such as a chair or the like in the furniture raising/lowering floor equipment.